Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/275

Rh the southern point of Africa into the Indian seas beyond. The Spirit of the Cape of Tempests, mantled in blackness of cloud, girt about with lightning and storm, towers skyward from the billows, portentous, awful, vague, and with an unearthly voice of menace warns the voyagers back. I have said that the grandest of English supernatural creations is Milton's Satan. No other personage has at once such magnitude and definiteness of outline as that sublime, defiant archangel, whether in action or in repose. Milton, like Dante, has to do with the unknown world. The Florentine bard soars at last within the effulgence of "the eternal, coeternal beam." Milton's imagination broods "in the wide womb of uncreated night." We enter that "palpable obscure," where there is "no light, but rather darkness visible," and where lurk many a "grisly terror" and "execrable shape." But the genii of wonder and terror are the familiars of a long succession of our English poets. Coleridge, who so had them at his own call, knew well their signs and work; as when he pointed a sure finger to Drayton's etching of the trees which

Science drives spectre after spectre from its path, but the rule still holds—omne ignotum pro magnifico, and a vaster unknown, a more impressive vague, still deepens and looms before.

A peculiarly imaginative sense of the beautiful,